Photoshop Express for iPhone First Time User Experience
The good bits:
- This app fully embraces the free sample approach. The product appears to be aimed at people who want to quickly edit photos taken on their phones. Instead of putting up a wall by asking users to log in, the app makes the majority of its functions accessible without an account. A user can jump right in and edit, save, share, even send her photos to be printed at a local Walgreens, without running into a sign-in prompt.
- Adobe saves the sign-in prompt for places where they promote the Adobe Revel cloud-based storage solution. If a user decides that she would like to access her photos from another device, this is the point at which she’d need to create an account.
- Ultimately, this approach allows users to quickly edit their photos while providing an entry point for other Adobe products.
- Instead of providing long tutorials for each editing function in the app, Photoshop Express has a user-guided tour with a combination of modeless and modal hints. For example, when I tap the icon that looks like sliders in the bottom toolbar, a temporary hint with the text “Corrections” appears on the screen to let me know what that function does. Then, if I tap on a correction like “Sharpen”, I see a modal alert that tells me the photo has been automatically zoomed (and gives me the option of turning that function off). Because there are a fair number of features in Photoshop Express, the user-guided approach works better than an up-front tutorial because many users may never need some of the functions.
- Adobe also repeats the user-guided hints occasionally, seemingly trying to address the limited space in our short-term memories. The hints do not repeat after they’ve been triggered in one session, but, if a session has ended and the user returns to the app after a long period of time, they will appear again.
To be improved:
- The one element that gets in the way of the user quickly editing her photos is the 4-panel intro tour. Like many modern intro tours, the photography used to make it look nice is out of context from the text laid on top. For example, the text on the 3rd panel talks about how noise reduction can improve night-time photos, but the photo underneath is a daytime scene.
- Other panels are repetitive; the 1st panel mentions printing to Walgreens but then the 2nd panel mentions it again. The Adobe Revel panel is helpful, but doesn’t have a call-to-action, so it’s not clear why this is shown up front. It seems the entire intro could have been reduced to a single panel, pushing any information about special functions or filters to the user-guided tour.
- Finally, the intro tour does not allow the user to skip it and jump into the app.
- While it is nice that Adobe tries to address cognitive load by making the user-guided hints reappear after a period of inactivity, the approach could be improved. In less than 24 hours after I first installed the app, the hints started reappearing again, and it was annoying to have to re-dismiss the modal alerts. I would suggest Adobe look at a combination of frequency of use (to determine features that may have been committed to memory) as well as time to decide when to repeat things. It also bears mentioning that a number of hints could be removed altogether by adding text labels under the function icons. That way, a user would never have to commit those to memory.